Nvidia seems to have issues with fan control more often than they should. Up until a few versions ago (almost the entire 180 series as I recall) I couldn't use any of the newer ones because the fan would never slow back down again once it sped up, and I had other similar problems a few versions before that. All WHQL drivers, of course.

I suppose its nice that they're constantly updating their drivers with optimizations for new games, but sometimes they seem to be outpacing themselves.

I do usually use reference drivers though, and I don't update unless there is a specific reason to do so, so it would perhaps be wiser to use EVGA's board-specific releases in the future. Fans running too fast is one thing, but too slow is something else entirely.

It's good that Ubisoft responded to this. Since obviously it will be fully cracked sooner rather than later, there will be a lot of journalists asking them for comments about that when it happens and they've set the precedent of responding. Now they will likely have to publicly admit their DRM doesn't actually work, and it will give everyone that bought it something to think about when they inevitably have some sort of, at least minor, hassle with it.

I was very disappointed to hear you can't play the multi-player modes single-player with bots like you could in the earlier BF games.

On a good server with mature players, the Battlefield games were easily some of the best computer gaming I've ever experienced. On server with brats and idiots, there wasn't much point.

Playing alone with bots made up for this to a certain degree. In my opinion, BF2 with bots, while it hardly compared to a good server, was much better than the typical, disorganized public server. At least the general flow of the gameplay worked right, and it made for a fun shooting gallery. It's why I kept it installed for so long.

It seems as I get older I have less and less patience for the jerk-offs on the typical public servers, to the point now where I won't even subject myself to it, and I don't really have the time to go seeking out good matches/players anymore.

I can appreciate why they didn't, of course. Given the probable amount of work it would take, it wouldn't be worth it given how few people would actually be interested in it. I imagine that the people that play like twits on public servers just like to play it that way, and the serious people are willing to invest the time to sort themselves out (it really can be truly awesome with good players).

It's just a shame it's gone a step backward feature-wise in this sense. I'd pay for that as DLC in the future if they put real effort into it. It would give us co-op as well, which was also lots of fun, and you only need a handful of people to make that worthwhile (just two player BF2 coop with my roommate back when was a hell of a lot of fun).

In reality, I doubt this DRM would have any practical downsides for me. I am always connected to the internet, and it's been a long, long time since I've had any interruption in my service (though I have increasingly been playing games on my laptop). Though I want the option to be available, odds are that I won't actually want to re-install it and play again five years from now either. It's the principle for this one.

I'm sure the pirates will crack it in short order, they always do.

In this case though, that won't make much difference to me. In the past when there was DRM I didn't like, I'd just install one of the cracks to get around the annoyance, but in this this case I just won't be buying it at all.

That was the thing before. The DRM annoyed me, but not to the point where I would entirely forgo playing a game I was otherwise interested in. This one is just dropping off my radar entirely. I no longer have any interest in any previews, ads, screenshots, or anything. Just blotted out of my mind. When I'm walking down the aisle in the store, it will just be an obstacle on the shelf obstructing my view of the games I actually might buy. It's a shame, because it's a good series.

As usual, none of this will make a lick of difference to the people who pirate it though. I must admit that, if it is good, I will probably be tempted, but that would just be playing into their hands, and they'd think "Aha,see? We need even stronger copy protection."

I need to be connected to Ubisoft constantly to play Silent Hunter 5 single-player, and if my connection dies the game just stops mid-stride?

I don't usually do a lot of bitching about DRM stuff. I don't like it of course, and I think it's silly when they try to take it beyond just stopping casual copying, but I'm probably just too old or something to get all worked up about it. I wouldn't, for instance, bother to boycott a game because it has DRM I don't agree with.

Until now, of course.

Hopefully this isn't just me, and the rest of the people who were willing to be pushed so far will draw the line here.

edit: And yes, I know what you're going to say, that had I bothered to boycott stuff earlier maybe it wouldn't have come this far, and that it didn't take any leap of imagination to have seen this sort of DRM coming, but nevertheless here we are.

I would also point out that if they took the fact that you always have to be connected to their server and did something with it beyond just DRM that couldn't be done otherwise, then I wouldn't be so against it. I'm sure they could think of some interesting ways to add value to it given that the devs can now count on people always being connected to a central server (and not just social-networking, achievement crap). That would certainly change my opinion to a degree. Give and take. I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but I'm sure there's something.

I really want to buy it, I've bought every other one the day they came out (and for the most part had good enough luck), but this time I'm sitting on my hands until things are sorted. There are few things worse than playing a game, no matter how good it is, where there's always that nagging worry in the back of your head that it might crash at any moment.

It would be nice if they would upgrade the underlying engine a bit. It was improved somewhat with patching, but the performance is still to low given the quality of the graphics. It also just kind of has an overall clunky feeling that's hard to put my finger on, but pretty common in console ports.

Also, to join the inevitable forthcoming chorus, lose the damn Social Club thing. That is the most ridiculous piece of parasitic garbage I've ever seen attached to a video game. Worse that GFW. Speaking of GFW, lose that too.

Though I agree with your sentiment in many situations, and programming has to be watched in case it becomes a runaway situation (to a programmer, a program they find interesting is never done, and games tend to be interesting things to program), but keeping them too reigned in is why we have so many cookie-cutter games... yet another Unreal Engine shooter that's the same as every other one, except it has different graphics and a different story, and so on.

To me, one of the best aspects of trying a new game is to see what the cool things the programmers have done. There we get things like destructible environments in Red Faction, and new graphical tricks that make things look more realistic.

Remember the first Hitman game, when you were walking by a guard and his head would follow you? This was a little thing, but it was awesome and actually added a lot to the experience. It was also one of the first game I recall using ragdolls, and I probably spent hours blowing people out windows with a shotgun, dropping them off ledges, and just playing with that one feature.

Some of the best classics of all time were mostly advances in programming. Like, say, Elite ("I bet we could procedurally generate stuff and put a whole damn galaxy on a BBC Micro with 32K of ram"), Wolf3D("Hey, if we only scale the textures vertically, we could do texture-mapping on a 386), Doom ("I bet we could get this going multiplayer over a network and change the face of gaming for all time.")

Granted, I don't think fancy footsteps are much of an example, but it is in the right spirit. Probably worse, if every development team insisted on writing their own engine, half of everything would be as buggy as Stalker for sure--it is nice to (mostly) be able to count on an Unreal Engine game being stable and well optimized (though the licensees could always add their own features on top of it).

Basically, I think creativity on the programming front is every bit as important, if not more so, than things like storytelling, and the game designers' tools are limited to what the programmers give them to work with.

Stormsinger wrote on Jan 23, 2010, 15:28:Sounds like a seriously warped sense of priorities...which is pretty much what happens when you let the programmers decide what's important (they frequently mistake cool-to-code for cool-to-play). Do these guys -have- any game designers?

Hm. I just happened to buy an iPod touch and Chinatown wars seems like a good portable game in theory. Cool as the the GTA3+ versions were, I always though in terms of pure arcade gameplay that it worked a little better from a top down perspective like the original.

I don't see it working that well on an iPod/iPhone though. The touchscreen controls just don't work very well. First of all, it means I have to cover up part of the screen with my fingers, and without any tactile feedback too often things go wrong just because I hit the wrong spot or it doesn't properly register my thumb sliding on the screen. It can be enormously frustrating. Might just need more practice though.

It's not that it's a bad gaming platform, it's just suited to different kinds of games. I'd love to see something like a Torchlight port. I'm sure there must be something like it out there burried amongst all the fart apps.

Screenshots seem to indicate effects-wise it's the worst looking of the bunch aside from having a higher resolution than the DS version (?). Looks like it doesn't have any shadows from the objects and the textures are kind of washed out. Of course, it's not as though I'm really demanding good graphics in something like this.

Yet another edit: Seems like everyone likes. If it works with accelerometer for left/right driving (I can't deal with the left/right, forward/back combination... murder on the wrists), maybe it's good.

$10 is a good deal considering the cost on other platforms.

Okay, I'll shut up now.

No wait, just one more thing: there's a video at toucharcade.com. Looks okay actually, I was wrong about some of the graphics stuff, like shadows.

You've seen the racers we have on the PC, right? You're confidently going to say you're most realistic than those?

SMS was formed by Ian bell from the remnants of Blimey! games and is comprised of all of the significant talent from the original SimBin team before the split. They're the people responsible for GTR, GT Legends and GTR2, all very respected hardcore PC Sim-racing titles. They're quite capable. The question is how short a leash does EA have them on when it comes to difficulty and realism. Without a doubt, SMS is capable of making what could be the most realistic sim to date, in league with iRacing, NKP and others.

Won't know until I try it though. I have a lot of trepidation because it's either going to be a huge disappointment or a brilliant sim. I have heard that the highest difficulty setting is quite realistic, no holds barred, but not yet from anyone I consider very reliable.

I must admit his blogs did reek of someone with some sort of personal axe to grind and were clearly written not as some sort of serious discussion of their practices, but just rants dolled up to look serious. The malware one in particular is laughable--just sticks in a few random quotes from a messageboard (I mean, come on) as evidence to cover himself. That probably works though, supermarket tabloids do that sort of thing all the time.

Don't get me wrong, Evony sucks and we'd all be better without its shadiness, but the guy could have actually tried harder with real research and such. He's just making an ass of himself trying to present simpleminded messageboard-type rants as some sort of serious journalist blog (an oxymoron I know, but I'm sure he fancies himself a journalist).

The whole thing is a farce. A lot of the crap he posted is asking for a libel suit. He shouldn't lose, but if he'd taken it seriously he would have been more effective, unequivocally covered himself, and more importantly, written something worth reading.

I like what Paketep said, it would be great if they could both lose. Perhaps they'll all spend a ton of money on legal fees and then the case will be thrown out or something.

Yeah, I thought Wolfenstein was pretty good. It wasn't ground-breaking or original in any way, but the combat was fun and the weapons were pretty cool. I could have done without the traipsing back and forth through the town and I didn't use the veil stuff all that much, only when I really had to because it wrecked the immersion with all its greenness and such.

I think maybe they strayed too far from the original Wolfenstein. Giving the player supernatural powers wasn't a good idea. Part of the charm of Wolf3D was that you were just a regular guy thrust into some creepy supernatural evilness, and like any red-blooded badass, you don't ask any questions and just pick up a chaingun and start blasting it all to hell. Doom was pretty much the same. It doesn't need much of a plot because there isn't anything to understand: You're good, they're bad, kill them.

Bottom line was that the actual gameplay part was fun, they just stuffed too much unnecessary shit in there.

If you could rent computer games, this one would be a renter. If they drop the price to $20, that would probably make me recommend picking it up. As it is, I'd say grab it later when the price plummets, which it likely will soon given hardly anyone seems to be buying it as it stands.

I'm surprised there are trademark disputes about this sort of thing. From my experience watching anime, most all of the robots in all of the shows look pretty damn much the same to me.

They probably won't have to remove anything. Just put some antennas on it or change the way the legs look or something. They could probably keep all of the movement mechanics and such the same and just change some of the geometry and textures in place. I'm not familiar with these particular mechs, but if the similarity from one anime to another is anything to go by, odds are they won't have to change all that much.

I much prefer the western style mechs to those Gundam and Macross things. They look much more like practical, mass-produced war machines. The Japanese ones are cool looking too but often they look awkward and entirely too flashy.

BTW: Can anyone provide pictures of the offending mechs and their counterparts?

I could go either way on this one actually. It depends in part on how well the first person perspective is done. The good ones make you feel the mass of your character and somehow the movement feels more natural. The bad ones, of course, make you feel like you're flying a camera around.

Not so long ago I was thinking about immersion in first person shooters and I think my biggest problem is that I've grown too accustomed to them like they were pure arcade games. I don't really look at the environment, I just subconsciously note where all of the cover spots are, where enemies are likely to pop up, which directions I can go and that sort of thing--like a "level" rather than a world. Instead of looking at it as though it were a real place, I look at it as though through the eyes of the level designer. I'm not so much thinking "which way should I go?" so much as I am "which way am I supposed to go?"

I sometimes think about all of the intricate little details built into the scenery of the levels, and that most all of the time I just sprint by it without really even seeing it.

I think how cool it must be for someone who has never played a game like this and doesn't just automatically see all of the seams and smoke and mirrors. They see a house on the side of the road in COD and see it as a house, whereas I just see it as a flat bit of scenery acting as a wall to funnel me in the right direction.

I think it might be an okay toy if it came with its own custom games specifically designed for that sort of thing. Probably simple shooting gallery sorts of games, but I don't see it being that much more fun than a $25 light gun. I doubt it would work well enough for a game designed around a mouse and keyboard.

What with the LCD and all, it probably isn't really going to be particularly cheap either, and I don't see it being much of a winner really. Maybe something like this without the screen would be cool in the future if and when we have practical VR headsets.

I always hate night missions in any game for the most part. The COD4 ones were okay for the most part because of the cool laser sight effects, but otherwise it's usually just like playing on a small monochrome monitor.

I did like a lot of the equipment in Special Forces though. I should probably dig all this stuff out. Great as BF2 can be, it really sucked the last time I tried it online. It definitely lives or dies by the quality of the players. Never managed myself, but I can only imagine that if you could fill both teams with friendly, serious players, it would be on the short list of best all time gaming experiences.

Hopefully they take testing and bug squashing seriously this time. When a game is released with very serious bugs, bugs that aren't configuration specific, but that everyone gets, that's a pretty bad sign.

Still, it's a great game, so I'm all over it, but not until it's given the all clear bug wise or is patched enough to be acceptable this time. The first time playing through a game is the most important and enjoyable, but having that first experience marred by show stopping bugs, crashes (Clear Sky gave me the only BSOD's I've had in at least five years), and too much time tweaking and problem solving is something I won't deal with. I'm not buying it the day it comes out as with the last two even though I knew what to expect with CS--saw it on the shelf and couldn't resist.

It will be hard to resist, but the experience will be much better for it. When I was frustrated with playing CS a week or two after its release and loaded up Crysis (of all things), I was surprised by how strikingly different playing a stable game was. It had come to the point where I had to actually change my playing style, not even just the constant saving (quicksaves being untrustworthy), but things like not running across a map too fast because that could cause the game to crash, and just the general relief of not having the constant worry about crashes nagging at the back of my mind while I played. It was truly like a breath of fresh air. I had a relatively good experience with it compared with many people on their forums too.

I'd rather see no engine improvements like better graphics and such, but just bug fixes and cleaning up since CS. After all, aside from the bugs, X-Ray is a pretty good engine as it is. Very pretty. Maybe I'd like to see the draw distance of the shrubs lengthened because that pop up looked pretty ridiculous sometimes with the dark shrubs on light terrain--hills would be light tan in the distance, but totally covered in dark brown grass when you got there. That could be pretty easily solved by just matching the two properly. It seemed like it might be better from the video. Couldn't really tell.

They're good games though, very good games. That's the real reason why its so frustrating. Good enough to deal with more bugs than usual, but only to a point.